How do restaurants and food establishments prepare food so quickly?

Question

And I’m not talking about fast-food joints like macdonald’s. I’m talking about your everyday restaurants, especially asian restaurants where they have many dishes. How do they take your order and have it cooked and out in a reasonable timeframe? (Less than 10mins waiting time)

In: Other

Answer 1

Lots and lots of prep. There are people hired (usually junior) whose jobs are just to prep and portion food — the technical term is [*mise en place*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place). That would involve cutting tons and tons of vegetables, mixing tons and tons of sauces, cleaning and marinating the fish and poultry, etc. which are then refrigerated. Everything done many hours prior to the actual time it is cooked/served. For the more complex dishes, most restaurant chains have a central kitchen (which is an industrial scale food factory some with heavy automation and robotics) that prepares [par-cooked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcooking) (half-cooked) food, seals it up, and transports loads of it to the outlets. The outlets can just do some minimal cooking or heating and voila! it’s done. Some of these central kitchens may even be owned by third-party food manufacturers that specialise in wholesale of par-cooked food to restaurants. A restaurant could buy containerloads of individually sealed cashew-stuffed roast turkey or whatever from such food manufacturers and have them trucked to all its outlets.

For soups (which Chinese take pride in slow-boiling for as much as 18 hours), this could be boiled the previous day at the central kitchen/factory, portioned and individually packed, blast frozen, and transported to the outlets. The outlets just need to microwave them.

Answer 2

YouTube has a great series called Mise En Place that shows the behind the scenes prep work in restaurants.

Answer 3

A lot of prep work is done the night or morning before. Also a lot of Mexican and Asian dishes are the same ingredients presented in different ways. So a burrito can be slapped together really fast using the same ingredients that are used for other dishes.